For the major studios, 2023 has proven to be a year to forget, with all of the usual suspects enduring at least one major misfire before we’d even reached halfway on the calendar.
Warner Bros. has watched The Flash go down in a ball of flames to wind up as one of the biggest box office bombs in the history of the industry, while Disney has sat by and been unable to prevent Indiana Jones and the Dial of Destiny from failing to keep its head above water.
Not even the mighty Marvel has been safe, with Ant-Man and the Wasp: Quantumania being anointed the worst-reviewed and largest money-losing project in franchise history, and $225 million series Secret Invasion is only continuing the decline on account of its shockingly low viewing figures.
However, there’s a shining beacon of light among the misery, with Angel Studios quite literally doing the lord’s work. The independent outfit aren’t just responsible for Sound of Freedom – the success story of the year that could be soaring as high as $200 million domestically – with the company also being given dispensation to continue shooting biblical TV series The Chosen despite both writers and actors being on strike. It’s almost as if a helping hand was offered from upstairs…
Comic book adaptations, legacy sequels, reboots, and remakes might be failing on a consistent basis, but if you want to be named as the single most successful studio in all of Hollywood this year, then leaning into religion appears to be doing the trick, with not even a dual-pronged strike and the height of big budget season doing a damn thing to slow Angel Studios down.